Why Microsoft Won't Have Blu-ray on the Xbox

Ian Lamont writes "Ever since Toshiba stopped production of HD DVD players, many Xbox 360 owners have been wondering when Microsoft will offer some sort of Blu-ray option for the Xbox 360. The answer: Probably never. Microsoft's product manager for the Xbox 360 has told Reuters that Microsoft is not in talks with Sony or the Blu-ray Association. Why not? The Industry Standard points to HDi, an obscure Microsoft technology that was part of the HD DVD interactivity layer. HDi may be dead on physical media, but it could potentially be applied to other Microsoft HD-compatible technologies such as Xbox Live Arcade and Windows Media Center, and be part of a long-term play to own a big share of the market for HD content delivered over the Internet."

Comments

Live marketplace

[tonyreadsnews]

Ummm, because like others have said, the war is not over. Blu-ray discs still have to compete with digital distribution. Even Gates mentioned at CES. They've partnered with quite a few places (One is Disney!) so they will likely pursue downloads through their Live marketplace, including HD content before trying to license something from a competing console.

Re:Live marketplace

[katorga]

Digital distribution will get killed by the ISP's and their bandwidth throttling in the US. It competes directly with their core content distribution model. Disk is still the high-bandwidth, lowest cost distribution model for 20GB files in the current environment.

Sony's BR 2.0 spec with a hybrid digital-physical model is the best fit.

Re:Live marketplace

[Sandbags]

Digital dsitrubution is NOT a competitor. It is for reneted or short term materials, but lets face it, if my choice is to save $5 or less to download a movie instead of buying the hard copy, or risking loosing the media and also incurring the cost for it's storage.

With physical media I:
- can easily loan it to a friend or family member, without wasting blank media or time to burn it.
- can move it from system to system in seconds, not hours over a network connection
- don't need systems to be compatible for steaming or sharing, a BD player in each room costs about the same as (and will cost less than) the equipment to connect the TV to the network for streaming HD.
- Can make electronic copies for backup (wether currently legal or not)
- can move it off my hard drives at will without buying media and wasting hours (days) to burn it (If I want to encode it on the computer I can, and in less time than burning a DVD...)
- don't have to buy bigger and bigger hard drives and RAID system as my collection grows
- don't have to wait DAYS for Antivirus scans to complete, or copying to new drives as my old ones fill up.
- don't have to back it up

Digital distribution works fine for music, for which I can have tousands of songs on cheap hard drives, and streaming works great over even the cheapest wireless devices for stereo surround audio. It's easy to maintain and copy when your whole collection is less than 100GB (and that's a BIG collection). When a single HD movie is 20-50GB, it's not easy or cheap to maintain my own collection electronically. heck, even standard definition DVDs are hard to maintain on a sharing network.

On-demand video? yes, digital downloads may very well replace Blockbuster. If an all-you-can-eat subscription was available (netflix size library, digitized in HD, and available to start playing within 5 minutes) and the fee was equivolent to current subscription fees ($15 per month) it might become feasable, but you still can't take it with you unless you download the entire movie before leaving... When I go on vacation, or to a friend's house, I want a few dozen good classic movies with me, and a few new ones to. Even at over 8MB downspeed, I'm looking at typing up my pipe for days to download a weeks worth of movies, and hundreds of GBs to store them on. Also, my laptop, even if it had that much storage, doesn't plug into most hotel TVs...

Digital downloads are strong competition for HBO and other networks. Why pay $12/month per channel when you could pay $20/month and see every movie your hear desires on demand? This I see is where digital downloads will make their mark. They're obviously competition for the rental industry, provided the set top box is part of a service and not several hundred dolars by itself.

The best solution in my mind? ...best of both worlds. A set top DVR that can record and play back live HDTV, integrates on on-demand service allowing both per-purchase options as well as monthly all-access subscriptions (hot releases cost a buck or two extra each). Also, instead of a $4 rental, offer a $14 download-to-own option, and for an additional $3 they'll send the original media to you in the mail in a few weeks so you don't have to make backup copies. The set top box should integrate a BD writer so anything you've downloaded (or recorded live) you could burn to your own media. Also integrate it into the network so movies and other content of the DVR can be shared on the network and vice-versa. Also allow an agent to run on a computer so you can not only download movies, but select which PCs they're automatically copied to, like podcasts, so you can keep the most recent, unwatched movies, as well as a few selected favorites, on your laptop and your iPhone without having to copy them there (and waste hours) when you're on the go.

SUN vs. MicroSoft - Fight (BD-J vs. HDi)

[erexx23]

This is SUN vs. MicroSoft
(BD-J vs. HDi aka MSJava Script)

Java is the platform for the world wide distribution of IPTV.

I don't think that MS will be pushing anything that competes with their version of a Java virtual machine much less include a Sony product in their 360.
(the final offer by MS and Toshiba to prevent a format war was the inclusion of HDi... Sony and Sun walked away)

While it makes Cents that they should, I don't think they will.

Re:Doesn't make sense

[The-Bus]

You're right. Profit is profit. The simplest answer is that having a Blu-Ray drive available for the Xbox 360 is simply not profitable. The initial HD DVD drive sold relatively poorly. I believe sales were about 500,000. There's no reason to think a Blu-Ray drive would sell any better.

Sure, it makes them money, but it doesn't make them enough profit. Otherwise, they would've done it.

Re:Doesn't make sense

[ergo98]

But their standard is completely dead now it seems, and to keep pushing for it is incomprehensible.

HD-DVD is indeed completely dead, and Microsoft has stopped manufacturing the HD-DVD add-on (more correctly they no longer Toshiba to make it for them). Microsoft knows that HD-DVD as a physical format is dead.

However XBox Live! isn't dead, nor is traditional DVD. The former has great future potential (it, and similar services like iTunes movies, aren't something I'm interested in because the bitrate is going to remain far too low until the end-to-end infrastructure of the internet is dramatically improved, but it's good enough for a lot of people), and the latter is easily good enough for most consumers.

So no, their "standard" isn't dead. DVD is easily going to be dominant until the next generation of game machines, possibly even to the one after that. And then there comes a point where optical media doesn't even matter anymore.

Really this is all rather silly. Microsoft barely supported HD-DVD. Why do people think they're going to rush and support Blu-ray, especially given that the technical requirements of Blu-ray guarantee that such an add-on would be very pricey: How can you compete with Sony that is already selling a full game machine with Blu-ray at less than the cost of a competing companies stand-alone, no-game-machine-included players.

Re:Doesn't make sense

[Locutus]

But their standard is completely dead now it seems, and to keep pushing for it is incomprehensible. I mean, they have to be more intelligent than that, right?! The fact that they lost this one does not mean they will be willing to chance the loss of their position in the market with Windows. They exist only because Windows exists and believe it or not, Blu-ray is a platform threat to Windows. Also remember that Microsoft only "supports" products which are Windows platform lock-ins. They tolerate others doing things on their platform only until those vendors products become a threat or start enabling capabilities on other platforms. One thing about Blu-ray Microsoft despises is its menu system is implemented in Java and every Blu-ray device ships with embedded Java in it.

Check this out and look for the word "pawn" in it:
http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/3000/PX03096.pdf

So thinking that Microsoft will do what the market asks and help a potential threat to their existence is asking a very lot of Microsoft. They've never done this without either a way to own or destroy the cross-platform capabilities or a way to force their own product(s) onto the market. Microsoft's profits in a market sector have been traded many many times for protection of the Windows platform. Again, Microsoft exists only because Windows exists and without that, over 60% of the profits go away very very quickly. If Blu-ray is seen as a platform threat, Microsoft will not support it without some plan to eliminate the platform threat. And I think the threat has more to do with Java being the Blu-ray spec than Sony's ownership or creation of the spec. IMO.

I find it hard to believe they think the distribution/network is mature enough to jump on a network distribution mechanism instead. But they may feel that they can slow the adaption enough with disabling or stalling the Blu-ray devices on their platform(s). Xbox is the obvious one because they attempted to leverage it for promoting HD-DVD. They knew they couldn't embed it in the Xbox because the price increase would have given PS3 more leverage. We should soon start to see see how they will try to stall Blu-ray on Windows as the devices start moving to PCs.

LoB